For Laurethie, wherever this may find her

Prior to arriving here in Cairo, I hadn't posted on this blog consistently since mid-June 2008. That's a LONG hiatus, and Laurie was (in her gentle way) prodding me to, you know, THROW US A FREAKIN' BONE HERE! and mention why, what all had been going on in the meantime, etc.

Well, I promised Laurie I'd write it all up when things calmed down a tish, and as I'm sitting here with family and friends either at work or running errands (and hence not available to chat) and a gargantuan file trying to download (I'm getting fed up with the slowness of XP, which will have driven me into the arms of Linux just as soon as this file arrives), there's no time like the present to stare at a single, unchanging webpage and try to explain things. :-D

When we last left our intrepid RaleighSlade family, we had picked up and left Raleigh for Parts West, namely the wilds of Utah and Brigham Young University. The purpose of the summer out there was to get me through an intensive Arabic course offered at the uni., on the theory that spending the two grad school summers studying Arabic first domestically and then abroad would be a more effective sequence than the converse. I arrived moderately well-prepared in terms of formal Arabic, which is what newspapers are written in and newscasts presented in. Unfortunately, I was woefully behind in Colloquial Arabic, which is what everyone *actually* speaks, and in all too many ways bears merely a passing resemblance to formal Arabic. Ugh.

SOO...I wound up spending simply ungodly amounts of time in the library and our little married housing suite working to catch up to my peers in that regard. This killed off basically any time I would've spent blogging, and the day after our term at BYU ended it was time to hit the road for home. We had exactly four days to make it cross-country before Anna was due to start work, and only two more days after that until classes started for me. We managed to sneak a day or so visit to Colorado Springs to introduce Anna to my Aunt Sharrie and Uncle Kenny (as well as show off the little man, of course). I then drove them up to Denver, from which they flew out to see Dan and Vicky in West Lafayette, IN. I had a longish drive from Denver across Kansas, where I spent a night with an old cousin I hadn't seen in about 17 years, and then had a delightful lunch with my old climbing partner and her husband as I made my way through St. Louis. I got to spend a night at Vicky and Dan's with Anna and the little guy, dropping them off at the Indianapolis airport the next morning on my way to Winston-Salem and my friend Jen's place. Needless to say, it was something of a whirlwind, and blogging weren't gonna happen.

Fall term was fairly busy, although nothing too crazy. I had two classes that could've been excellent and were made merely okay by some individuals who shall remain nameless, and my Arabic class was a major letdown after BYU. I still love Ustaaza, but our resources at NCSU were such that Arabic was 2 hrs. per week, rather than 2 hrs. a day -- and that's a MAJOR step down in language pedagogy. I began meeting with a fellow Arabic student about once a week to practice chatting, and that's about all that kept my skills from degrading completely. Then Thanksgiving/Christmas hit, throughout all of which the little guy was fighting off an ear infection and the croup. Ugh. Then he shared it with ME, generous little man that he is, and wiped me out until a few weeks into the Spring term at school.

Spring term was, to put it mildly, frustrating as hell. There were two bright spots - my Arabic translation class, and the Global Problems class with Dr. Boettcher. The other stuff, well...boo. I swear, one of these days I'll have the time and energy and focus and preparation to write a thesis-type thingy I can be proud of. As it was, the course overload (to say nothing of the class I detested which took up nearly twice as much time as it ought to've, largely due to the efforts of the repeatedly aforementioned MouthBreather) was such that my Capstone wound up being significantly less interesting, thorough, or insightful than I would've liked. On the flip side, I learned tons about Iran and did some Deep Thinking about development praxis, so that was good. Maybe it'll help me with the work I'm beginning tomorrow.

So...Anna was planning to head off to San Diego to live with her folks and work on a 13-week Travel OT contract, since the idea of staying around Raleigh and trying to be Super Single Mom for the summer wasn't hugely appealing. She's employable everywhere, and I'm apparently employable practically nowhere, so we figured once I got back from Cairo we'd follow me wherever I could find a job. As of this writing, prospects are nebulous at best, imaginary at worst. We'll see if the summer catalyzes anything.

This kind of leads us to today. What on Earth is Timmy actually DOING in Cairo? Well, apart from the language study, which will begin in mid-June, I'm chasing down the last three credits I need toward my degree by doing an internship with an NGO. The group is named Alashanek Ya Balady, which translates roughly as "For your sake, O my country." It was founded by an AUC grad (who I guess is now a PhD candidate and/or adjunct prof.) who is sufficiently awesome at what she does to have earned the group (and herself) a number of major international awards for the quality of their work. I'm hoping to learn TONS from her, whatever I wind up doing.

...and, honestly, it's TBD what I'm going to be doing. I started taking the class I detested so SPECIFICALLY because it addressed what AYB wanted me to be doing...until they didn't, because they came up with a new Strategic Plan. So now it's not clear what my role will be, although I'll be meeting with the bosslady tomorrow and she will no doubt fill me in.

Yesterday, as I mentioned in my post, I hoofed it back to Zamalek from Maadi and the NGO's headquarters. Well, I decided to take it somewhat easier today, since I'm getting blisters in places I didn't even know I had. So I woke up late-ish, had breakfast and spent a couple hours being shown how little Arabic I ACTUALLY know despite having been a pretty big fish in the NCSU Arabic pond (humility is GRRRRREAT!), and then napped for a couple hours to the sound of Arabic music videos. Once I decided I'd wasted enough of the day and couldn't stand the thought of looking at my textbooks, I decided to see if I could find my future school.

This revealed to me the Truth of something I'd read in a book on Egyptian culture. Egyptians will, indeed, do their utmost to help you find a place...even when they have no Earthly idea where it is. This generally results in their giving you very explicit, detailed directions which take you nowhere near the place you're trying to get, but WILL take you beyond their sightline. Then you gotta ask someone ELSE who has no idea how to get where you're going, and just kind of hope you eventually wander in the right direction. I spent an hour walking around within about three blocks of the street I was trying to find, and NOBODY's advice was any good until I stumbled onto it by accident. Oh. My. Goodness. Best of all, it turned out to be less than five minutes from the first people I asked for directions.

On my walk home from the school, I decided to visit those helpful folks again (traffic cops, all three of them) and let them know where it was for future reference. Well, it turned out that none of the three I had seen two hours before was still on duty, but I didn't recognize that until I had already struck up a conversation with them. So THEN had to somehow explain to them that No, I wasn't lost, and No, I didn't need anything, I just wanted to be helpful and tell the guys I had spoken to earlier that I had found the street that they had sworn up and down didn't exist in this neighborhood, and it was just one street down, a right turn, and then the third street down on the left. Easy.

Well, sure, except that I was tired, and seemed to have forgotten all of my Arabic, so it was a disaster. Anyway, I ultimately managed to convey everything, and then it was off to home. But goodness, was that frustrating.

Thankfully, I had already had 4 or so interactions with people that validated me a little bit. So far, people are about 0 for a dozen on guessing my nationality properly -- which, generally, is a good thing. The leading contenders have been Dutch, French, and English (2x each), Spanish once, German once or twice, and assorted Scandinavian countries. When I tell them I'm American, I can see their preconceptions crashing down around their ears. And I LOVE that.

That's one of my goals, I guess. To dismantle people's stereotypes of Ugly Americans, one conversation at a time. Thankfully it appears that the bar for Americans speaking non-American Arabic is significantly lower than it is for non-American Spanish and French, so people have been moderately impressed even though I, by my estimation, suck pretty hard at this game at this point.

NEway, it's getting cold out here again -- how is it that it NEVER occurred to me that I would experience this sensation in Cairo, and it's the biggest problem I've had so far? I CAN'T GET WARM!! -- and I need to track down something to eat. So I'm wrapping this up.

Before I go, though, a funny story about food...earlier today, I asked the front desk guy what some good food would be. Roughly "Maa huwa aakl gayyid fil mintaqa dii?" He looked at me and said, quizzically, "Mukh?"

Which means "brains." I rather emphatically said no, and he said "Well, we eat it here!" To which I replied that I might eventually, at the end of three months, but certainly not by the end of Day 3. Honestly, I doubt I'll be trying it even after 3 months -- memories of the presentation I did with Kristi Schneider and Katie Hill on Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (a.k.a., mad cow disease), prions, and massive plaques in people's brains still loom far too large in my head -- but some kind of kushari or shwarmar is probably in order before too long.




P.S. Bonii for whomever can identify the song to which the title of this post pays tribute...(Artist, too.)